Shooting the Holidays: Christmas Decorations

I wanted to record my wife putting up some Christmas ornaments on Saturday, but of course I couldn't just whip out the camera and click a few shots. I had to set up a little studio. And I wanted to illustrate the benefits of off-camera flash. So here's what the setup looks like (not the final shot). The light is off camera pointing slightly off to the right of the subject. That's because I didn't want the full center of the light on the subject, only the soft edge, which is called feathering. I don't remember the exact settings but the flash was probably set to about 1/4 power on manual mode about 6 feet away, and I used a Sekonic L-358 light meter to meter the flash manually. This is so I know exact amount of flash contributing to the scene and can get consistent, repeatable results. I put the settings the meter tells me into the camera, most importantly the aperture and ISO, and fire. I simply stood closer to the subject and used a 24-85 mm lens on my Nikon D200. So, below is one of the final shots, and it's a bit set up. I directed the model on what to do and waited for the best moments to snap. Notice also the composition. There's a strong foreground element, albeit purposely out of focus, but I really wanted the subject to be the facial expression, and to get that I had to sacrifice some sharpness on the ornament. Notice how your eye bounces back and forth between the ornament and the face, keeping you inside the image. I could also have gone the other way, putting the ornament in focus and letting the face blur out. A single light source contributing about 100% of the light is a main light. It leaves a deep shadow on the opposite side of the subject, and you can see that here. The light falloff also leaves a bit of the foreground in shadow. However, I didn't bother filling those shadows because these are just Christmas decoration shots, not fine art portraits; but I wanted them to look good and illustrate lighting principles. Because the light is off camera, there's no reflection in the window or glasses, another reason to use off-camera flash. For post processing, I ran the image through Perfectly Clear, which took about two clicks to intelligently process the image to what my eye wanted. I did a bit of quick dodging with a layer in CS6 to bring out the facial shadows, and finally I played a bit with soft focusing and curves in Nik Color Efex Pro. You can also dodge quickly in Lightroom, but I wanted to experiment with layer dodging in PS. The image would have been fine with just a few clicks in PFC, however. The quality of light, almost a Rembrandt style with a triangle of light underneath the far eye, and correct exposure is due to the use of modified light metered accurately, not post processing. Software merely made minor enhancements to an otherwise good negative, which is the point of getting it right in camera, and it gives me the opportunity to play with effects. Off camera flash is really a subject for another post, and I hope to do a blog post soon showing you how to use options in your own speedlight (using Nikon as an example) that you probably never knew existed or never though you could use, but it's not that hard! So stay tuned for that. Until next time, merry Christmas, and better shooting.